Zoe Swenson   It arrives in a long, plain box, spattered with raindrops. ‘Are you going to open it?’ ‘Later,’ Thom says. ‘Let’s enjoy lunch.’ ‘Don’t you want to see it?’ ‘I’d rather spend time with you.’ That means: I’ll open it when you’re not here.   Last week, he said, ‘If we’d had a […]

Rebecca Audrey Johnson   She woke suddenly, cheated by the shade. It had seemed the perfect spot, accessed via an alleyway running behind her, now hidden from view. Halfway down the narrow passage, which was really more of a space between corrugated iron sheets than a real passageway with meaning or direction of its own, […]

Maggie Ling   In my perverse mind it’s summertime: that hot summer of 1976. Which it could not have been, since Lukey was born in January. Even so, I persist in seeing it this way. Seeing my mother, in bikini and tie-dyed sarong, drifting from shaded bedroom to sun-scorched balcony, a whiff of coconut suntan […]

Omar Sabbagh   Amr was cogitating on Time – or to be more precise, timing. Like most gamblers he had a very large and capacious mind, and could think his way round to the latest cutting-edge research, say, on unicorns and UFOs. The way he figured it, standing there in the small, square, white-walled kitchen, […]

Suzanne Ghadimi   ‘Please,’ I said in desperation as I looked across the open bonnet of my car. It was 2.30am and we were in the garage. It was December and it was cold in Aberdeenshire. Colder than usual. ‘I just want to…’ ‘You have to stop!’ I begged. ‘…fix it,’ he said. He was […]

Lynda Clark is the author of the forthcoming novel Beyond Kidding, published by Fairlight Books on 31 October 2019. Lynda graduated from Nottingham Trent University with a BA in English Literature and an MA in Creative Writing. She has completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing. In 2015 she won the BBC Award at […]

Zoe Swenson is a freelance editor and writer. She grew up in northern Vermont in the pre-Internet era – reading, listening to vinyl records, and making things out of snow. She studied English literature and creative writing very happily at Bryn Mawr College (near Philadelphia) and Victorian literature less happily at Oxford. She then got […]

Suzanne Ghadimi is originally from Montreal, Canada, though she has lived for the past ten years in Scotland. Suzanne holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, BC, and an MLitt in Creative Writing with Distinctions from Aberdeen University. Her practices of visual and written arts often blend into each other […]

Rebecca Audrey Johnson has worked in the UK and abroad as a freelance translator, and has prior professional experience at various organisations linked to international affairs. She has a BA in French and Hispanic Studies (2002) and an MA in International Relations (2008) from the University of Birmingham. In 2013, she commenced her AHRC-funded doctoral […]

After a career as a published illustrator and cartoonist, Maggie Ling swapped dip pen for iMac to work with words alone. Since then, her prose fiction has been listed in numerous international short story competitions, including a shortlisting for the Bridport Prize and publication in Unthology 1 (Unthank Books 2010), Something Was There… : Asham […]